SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON: November 2015

Monday, November 23, 2015

Monday November 30 Champlain Parkway Meeting at Champlain Elementary School 7 p.m.--First in Nine Years!

STOP! RE-EVALUATE! RE-IMAGINE!

With the first public meeting on the Champlain Parkway in nine years just a week away, a new group, Safe Streets Burlington (SSB), encourages anyone supportive of re-design of the Champlain Parkway to quality and safe walk and bike facilities to attend the public meeting devoted entirely to the current design of the Champlain Parkway. SSB also supports re-design from complete lack of quality and safe vehicle travel facilities along the Parkway route.

The Champlain Parkway meeting happens at
7 p.m. Monday November 30, 2015 at the Champlain Elementary School adjacent to Champlain Chocolates on Pine Street.

Popup Human Space on Pine St.--Arts Riot 2015

The Parkway cost estimate, now $42.3 million, has no connection to the $11.5 million Railyard project.

The meeting occurs nine years to the day—November 30, 2006—when the final public input meeting occurred in the project development process which led to the 2009 the base authorization document, the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). The Parkway first formal planning meetings began a full half century ago in 1965.

VIEW THE CHAMPLAIN PLAN AT http://www.champlainparkway.com/_resources/documents/Champlain-Parkway-Alignment-052011.pdf

The City's official walk/bike advisory group, Burlington Walk Bike Council (BWBC) after six months discussion and analysis sent a detailed set of recommendations in December 2014 to Mayor Weinberger and Department of Public Works (DPW) calling for a numerous changes including: the safest and separate walk and bike facilities throughout the Parkway, the safest for all users intersections--modern roundabouts--and maintaining connectivity to Queen City Park Road and shopping areas southward with a roundabout at the base of Pine Street.

In addition, SSB calls for investing in a better economy for east side businesses

on Pine Street from Howard Street to Curtis Lumber by a six-foot re-alignment

moving six feet of greenway from the west side of Pine to the east side which enables wider sidewalks/plaza space as well as additional green space.

The current Parkway design features none of the BWBC recommendations or the street re-alignment sought by SSB. Safe Streets Burlington asks community leaders carefully examine the approved North Avenue Corridor Plan (NACP) which includes the important features recommended by both BWBC and SSB.

SSB in view of the current design takes the position: “Stop! Re-Evaluate! Re- Imagine!” The SSB website is: www.SafeStreetsBurlington.com

Thursday, November 19, 2015

SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON--WHO WE ARE

Champlain Parkway: Stop! Re-Evaluate! Re-Imagine!

Burlington residents committed to supporting highest quality and safest walking, bicycling and car facilities for all who live in and visit Vermont's most popular urban destination.

Like the famous Church Street Marketplace with the highest level of safety of any street and all of its intersections in Vermont, the principles of safe busy streets do not stray from separate walk, bicycle, and vehicle facilities, or shared space approaches to urban transportation design.

Church Street Marketplace Early in the Morning

The three principal ingredients for safe streets:

1. Sidewalks--sidewalks bring the safest environment for walking, cutting accident rates about 90% for the walking mode over streets without sidewalks.

2. Cycle track--protected bike lanes--along street sections afford for bicyclists of all abilities and ages safe conditions. Cycle track on busy streets is the newest and most popular street component since the advent of the sidewalk.

3. Modern roundabouts in single lane configuration also reduce all-modes serious and fatal injuries by about 90%. The roundabout is the "sidewalk" of the intersection, the "intersection safety belt for all modes", and outshines a traffic signals in all respects, such as, capacity to move traffic, reduction of gasoline use and pollutants, and delay for all users.

A completely "safe street" with moderate to high levels of traffic features sidewalks and cycle track along street sections along with roundabouts at major intersections.

Champlain Parkway: Stop! Re-Evaluate! Re-Imagine!

The Roundabout

The roundabout in single lane format cuts pedestrian, car occupant and bike serious and fatal injuries by about 90%. With 3,500 roundabouts in U.S. and Canada, built since 1990, not one pedestrian fatality through June 2015 -- 25 years Burlington! Burlington has 75 signalized intersections and there have been two pedestrian fatalities in 18 years!

Montpelier's Keck Cirlce (Spring and Main Streets) 1st U.S. Roundabout
East of Colorado, North of Maryland--1995

Roundabouts also calm speeds outward along each approach one to two blocks.

Cycle Track (protected bike lanes)

Only about one in ten able to bike do so on busy streets as they feel unsafe and not without reason. Cycle track, a new approach and immediately popular, puts a barrier, like a curb, flexible posts or other treatment to separate bicycles from vehicle streams. Cycle track passes the "popsicle test" for young children, is termed "family friendly" and offers higher safety than ordinary bike lanes found in practically all cases today.

Cycle track demonstration fall 2015 on North Union Street

Southern Connector Rethinking - Why!

By Steven Goodkind P.E.

The Southern Connector Project is one piece of a larger transportation plan for Chittenden County that was formulated over 40 years ago. It consisted of a network of highways that would encircle the county through Burlington, South Burlington, Williston, Winooski, Essex and Colchester. Parts of it included existing state highways and the interstate. There were also proposed new roads i.e. the Northern and Southern Connectors and the Circumfential Highway.

These proposed new roads share many common characteristics. They were to be for the most part limited access routes that would take traffic from existing local roads and reassign it to these new segments. But just as importantly, they all contained a huge conceptual flaw by relying on the perceived benefits of the ring road concept. .

We have learned a lot in the transportation field in recent decades and it is now widely recognized that it is generally better to improve our existing system to make it safer and more usable to all modes of transportation, than to build new

roads. We have also grown to appreciate the benefits of neighborhood connections that are not separated by manmade barriers such as limited access highways or large development projects. (The Burlington Town Center is an example of the latter case).

As a result, only portions of the original plan have been constructed. They are the three “bypass segments”, including the so-called “road to nowhere” in Burlington. The ring road concept is essentially dead.

However, the old concept does live on in at least one project. The Southern Connector, especially the piece from Home Ave. to Lakeside, is a classic example of old thinking, the benefits of which are far outweighed by the negative aspects it delivers. Because the latest version of this project dumps its supposed

reassigned traffic right back onto Pine Street without a connection to Battery Street, it fails to provide any significant transportation benefit that could not be achieved by simply opening the “road to nowhere”. The current plan eliminates

existing neighborhood connections and removes the connection of Pine St. to Queen City Park Road. A better name for it might be the “Southern Disconnector”. It is a costly and unnecessary relic of the past. This is further compounded by a design for the Pine St segment that is not up to the standards that Burlington has set for “complete streets”. Even our Public Works Director has acknowledged this when he recently said, “if we were designing this project today it would not look like this.”

If we hope to be a 21st century city, we need transportation projects that have designs that reflect 21st century thinking, not 20th century throwbacks.

The Mayor and his associates say they have done their best and it is too late for that. If we don’t proceed, we will have to pay back $7 or 8 million to the federal and/or State governments. This may be a possibility, but making the city payback money for a project that has been significantly changed, (notice I did not say cancelled), is unprecedented in Vermont. Here are some examples:

1) At the last minute the Northern Connector Project was modified to end at Manhattan Drive rather than at Battery and Pearl. This was to avoid destroying a good part of the Old North End.

2) The Circ Highway has been substantially redesigned to use existing routes and much of the originally proposed design will never be used

3) About 25 years ago, governor Dean stopped the construction of the Southern Connector from Home to Lakeside because of the uncertainty that a connection to Battery Street could be built.

4) Even though ROW had been secured and some railroad facilities and the DPW offices in its’ path have been relocated, the Southern Connector route from Lakeside to Battery through the Barge Canal was abandoned.

5) The “road to nowhere” was constructed 30 years ago but never completed and never maintained.

6) In the 1980’s, South Burlington decided not to participate in a segment of the Southern Connector that would have been in their community.

In none of these cases were the communities asked to repay the money they had spent on the project. There has never been and there should never be a penalty for making a project better and/or less expensive. History in this case is clearly

on the side of RETHINKING, REIMAGINING AND REDESIGNING the Southern Connector. It is the smart thing to do! It is not too late!

Monday, November 23, 2015

Monday November 30 Champlain Parkway Meeting at Champlain Elementary School 7 p.m.--First in Nine Years!

Thursday, November 19, 2015

SAFE STREETS BURLINGTON--WHO WE ARE

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